What I cooked last night.

British music journalist David Hepworth considered 1971 the most significant in rock music, calling it ' ... the most febrile and creative time in the entire history of popular music'. Puffery, of course, but that was the publisher’s jacket copy. (By comparison, Andrew Grant Jackson’s 1973: Rock at the Crossroads  could be read both as an alternative ‘greatest year’ or as confirmation of pop music’s decline.) Either way, 1971: Never a Dull Moment  exhumed a year awash with towering names producing so much great music the charts literally couldn't accommodate it all: The Doors' LA Woman , Van Morrison's  Tupelo Honey, The Faces'  Every Picture Tells a Story ;   albums by T-Rex, Black Sabbath, The Who, George Harrison, Pink Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Marvin Gaye, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell and more, obviously .  A teenager forging a dark and ragged pathway through life guided by such musical signposts could not help but be perplexed b...

August 19 is - was - National Potato Day. While the last thing the world needs is another National ‘Day’/‘Week’/‘Year’ of something or other, that particular recognition of the potato was at least just an industry marketing ploy: few would be aware of it apart from a muster of farmers from Colbinabbin, Terang, or the Adelaide Plains at an industry conference in some regional convention centre where they talk Russett Burbank and Sebago and Dutch Cream by day and get drunk in the evening. Conversely, the United Nations takes a much more serious approach, marking its own International Day of the Potato in May: its webpage, virtually anthropomorphising the innocent tuber, features such arrestingly appetising gerund-led (of course) headlines as ‘harvesting diversity, feeding hope’ . The UN’s ‘diversity’ invocation is not a plea for greater culinary variety - that would be far too mundane for the bureaucrats in New York, Geneva or Vienna. Leave that to the servant-class chefs. But let's ...

An end-of-winter dinner when spinach is plentiful and cheap. Olive oil and cream tame the rustic earthiness of the green leaves into a silky voluptuous pasta dish for spring. Yes, it’s still more than a week away but the sky can’t help telling the story. Sauté a medium chopped onion, a leek chopped into thin rounds, a chopped garlic clove and a red capsicum chopped into fine strips in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. In another pot, wilt a bunch of spinach, washed - but not spun, so the leaves retain some water - and chopped roughly, in some more olive oil. Turn with a wooden spoon occasionally and add plenty of salt and pepper. Remove from heat immediately the leaves have collapsed. * In the west, those winter evening skies have all but gone. The show is over: the dramatic severe blood-orange stains marked with patches of black, like Turner paint storms, are now transforming into paling blue-white spring ambitions, hanging on for longer, fingers of light grasping for summer. * Me...

She had left a hand-written note on the kitchen table. Inscribed on a paper napkin, cream, one of the more robust ones, embossed, that you could put around at a dinner party. ‘Dear family ….’ Cursive handwriting. Baroque Ks and Ms and Ts, all curlicues and loops and tails like little wedding dress trains.  ‘Going on bus to Llandysil …’ Telegram style. You never lose it. The style disappeared after the telegram’s demise; returned for the SMS and text. No-one had to relearn it, it just reappeared, with a few acronyms and affectations.  ‘ … to visit Laurie. He must be lonely.’ It was signed off with another heavily curlicued three-letter word: ‘Mum’. The curlicues probably haven’t changed much since the 1960s; maybe just a little flatter and slightly out of line. Visiting Laurie would be difficult. He has been dead 32 years and two months. He no longer resides at Llandisyl, the nursing home, which in any case fell to the wrecker’s ball, or whatever they demolish with these days, ...

 Mistakes follow me everywhere. They jump out at me like angry lions. * Centreway Steakhouse. 28 Centreway, East Keilor. Probably one of the best butchers in the north-west.

I was in the front row at a packed Nova cinema in Carlton with my younger teenage son for its ‘retrospective’ screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey . Kubrick’s 1968 film is in favour with arthouse buffs, despite original critics variously labelling the 149-minute epic as unintelligible, lacking plot, and being too long. Well, the film does encompass a timeline of four million years. How short do you want it to be? The front row was otherwise empty. Don’t people like being close? Or is a cinema screen an overpowering phenomenon for a generation attuned to watching a tiny device twelve inches from its face?  The front row has always been my choice since the legendary Doug Ling, RMIT film lecturer, enlightened me to its virtues: complete absorption in the film, no interruption to peripheral vision, near deafness, and plenty of legroom. I might add that during the more transcendental films the sweet redolence of something approximating incense also emanated from somewhere near the front o...